Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

When James Blish and his stalwart wife Judy received visitors in their Harpsden home during the last stages of Blish’s illness, he would not be able to speak at first. In any case, he was not a man all found it easy to feel at home with, though his intimate friends had no problems on that score. When he had drunk a neat tumbler of whisky, he would liven up, and then would begin to talk. He spoke impersonally for the most part, eyes darkly gleaming in his skull; perhaps he could talk about opera, to which he listened on LPs. The operas of Richard Strauss especially appealed to him. He made dry jokes as he went along, creaking with mirth. He had great admirations, great hatreds.

At one time, when our mutual friend, Harry Harrison, was also present, Blish was going on at some length about Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen , on which he was an enthusiastic authority.

Harry grew impatient at last.

‘Come on, Jim’, he said ‘it’s only a bunch of krauts singing’.

At which Blish broke off into tremendous fits of laughter.

All Blish’s novels repay reading and re-reading. He was never one of the most popular writers in our field, although his Cities in Flight series received great acclaim, and certainly A Case of Conscience —which won a Hugo Award—became popular even beyond the confines of SF. Perhaps it is because most of his books are ‘not redundant with physical action’ that he has otherwise been less widely enjoyed. He is, however, one of the most original of writers, and The Quincunx of Time one of his most original books.

He would have been delighted to see this new edition.

Time has gone by since the above was written. Books do not get reprinted as once they did, as the babble of voices grows higher. Jim Blish’s name is no longer greatly remembered.

I remember him. He died during a heatwave, on 30 July 1975, which happened to be the day I finished writing The Malacia Tapestry . It fell to my wife and me to find a burial place for Jim in Oxford. His last wish was to be buried in an Oxford college—he who was the graduate of an American college. It proved no longer possible to be buried in a college, unless one was perhaps a principal: the sacred but limited ground is choked with bones of earlier scholars.

‘They lie three deep’, one sexton reported to me, leaning on his divining rod.

We found Jim a resting place finally, in the overgrown St Cross cemetery. He lies within sight of the walls of Magdalen, not too far from where Maurice Bowra is buried, and another story-teller, Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows . I often pass the cemetery when going through Oxford, and think of my old friend, whose imagination travelled beyond the limits of our universe. R.I.P.

The learned papers on the SF of Kingsley Amis—even with titles like Revisionary Right-Wing Hermeneutics —have been few. I cannot compete in that area. However, some reflections might be set down with a view to reminding readers of an author, remarkable in his own right, who also took a great and amiable interest in SF over a number of years. During that period he produced two novels which should be better known to all those seriously interested in SF.

Since New Maps of Hell was published as long ago as 1960, we perhaps need reminding how widely influential it was. It was witty and knowledgeable, cocking a snook at the establishment, and served to silence many ill-informed critics. Indeed, it contributed to the slow upward climb (‘if that’s what it is’, I hear some say) of SF into respectability.

With that respectability, Amis and his friend Robert Conquest were soon to quarrel. Their argument was that SF was best within narrow compass under John W. Campbell’s jurisdiction, that the so called avante-garde experiments merely replayed much work of a similar disastrous kind done in the 1920s, and that respectability inevitably meant forsaking a previously unembarrassed muse.

On another front, Amis was conducting a war against educationalists, at a time when educational establishments were opening their doors to more students—and, Amis argued, thereby diluting quality. His slogan was, ‘More means less’.

In view of what has been happening since, we can see that if this slogan is applied to the SF field, Amis is probably right. Certainly the SF short story—the jewel in the crown of 1940s and 1950s SF—has suffered of late, when it is half-way financially profitable to write SF. (Once upon a time, so the legend goes, you wrote because … well, because it was SF, not because it paid.)

However, whatever Amis’s doubts, he wrote a few SF stories, ‘Something Strange’ being published in The Spectator in 1960, and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. It bears a family resemblance to my story ‘Outside’. He also edited the Spectrum anthologies with Robert Conquest, and reviewed SF for many years in The Observer —a post later taken over less sympathetically by his son, Martin Amis.

I had an early suspicion regarding Amis’s reading tastes. After the still explosively funny Lucky Jim he wrote That Uncertain Feeling (1955). Both novels were filmed, the latter as Only Two can Play, with Peter Sellers as Lewis, the awful Welsh librarian. (Amis himself appears in the film, hopping nimbly off a double decker bus.)

In That Uncertain Feeling, Amis came out of the closet. Whatever faults Lewis may have, in the way of boozing and chasing skirt, he is redeemed by his addiction to Astounding Science Fiction. Astounding gets two mentions in Chapter Five and one in Chapter Eight. It was about this time that Amis and I first met, to discover how well-versed we were in The Worlds of Nul-A.

Amis’s two SF novels are elegant exercises in their particular subgenres. Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980) is cautionary: ‘If this goes on …’ The Alteration (1976) is an impeccable alternative world.

Incidentally, we observe that when a noted humorist like Amis turns to SF, he becomes rather serious. The Alteration, indeed, centres round the topic of whether a young chorister, Hubert Anvil, should have his testicles removed. The scene is an England which has never renounced Catholicism.